* 22 entries including: US Constitution (series), technology & African development (series), quantum thermodynamics (series), telescopes to hunt gravity wave events, water in the deep Earth / meteorite fragments from deep Earth, scanning all animals, reduced-cost carbon capture, right-to-try and FDA, Solar System X objects, Gaia observatory data release, and e-bike revolution.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR JULY 2018: As discussed in an essay on ECONOMIST.com ("North Korea's Despot Has One Goal: Survival", 26 April 2018) by Banyan, THE ECONOMIST's rotating Asia columnist, after North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il died of a heart attack in 2011, his Swiss-educated young son Kim Jong Un took over. It is an indication of how little the outside world knows about North Korea that there was and is uncertainty about whether he was born in 1982, 1983, or 1984. The bottom line was that he was very young to be the leader of a country, and was unlikely to fare well -- being inexperienced, mostly interested in the good life, outside the circles of power.
That assessment seems to have been mistaken, Kim proving adept for the time being at the chess game of international relations. He has not only been engaged in diplomacy with South Korea, via President Moon Jae-in, but even engaging in a prestigious meeting with American President Donald Trump in Singapore in June -- after touching base with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in March. What makes Kim particularly adroit is that so far, he hasn't given up a thing of substance.
The primary focus of the international attention on Kim and North Korea is the country's nuclear program, with the goal being to get Kim to disarm. However, the agitation over North Korea's nukes can only prove to Kim just how valuable his nuclear weapons really are, as one of the three pillars of his rule:
Sanctions over North Korea's nuclear program continue to bite, and that contradicts Kim's effort to liberalize the economy. The line that Kim appears to be taking is to de-emphasize his nuclear program in favor of economic development, ceasing weapons tests and visible weapons development. By such a relaxation, Kim can hope to relax sanctions in turn -- all the more so because Donald Trump places a great deal of weight on public theatrics, without much concern for matters of substance.
Having established an adequate nuclear arsenal, Kim doesn't need to continue with provocations. However, he also has no intention of giving up his nukes, and no acceptance of the kind of intrusive inspection regime need to make sure he does. North Korea is opaque and, as far as Kim is concerned, is going to stay that way -- allowing him to quietly grow his arsenal under deep concealment, while wearing down the outside world with obstruction. After the Singapore meeting Trump, in a typical display of modesty, proclaimed he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Now that North Korea has returned to its traditional habits of obstruction and antagonism, Trump has sought other things to crow about.
* As discussed by another essay from ECONOMIST.com ("The Saudi revolution begins", 23 June 2018), on 24 June the Saudi government finally decided to allow women to drive cars. It is an indication of how repressive Saudi society has been to women that it didn't happen long ago, and it seems almost pathetically little. In reality, it was a loud shot in an extensive program of reform being driven by Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman. Cinemas have opened; music is performed in public; the obnoxious morality police are off the streets.
Westerners across the political spectrum tend to dislike Saudi Arabia, with its medieval sharia punishments and ill-treatment of women, driven by its severe Wahhabi form of Islam. Although Saudi Arabia is rich, it's not a very pleasant place to do business -- making freewheeling, glittering Dubai much more a center of commerce than Riyadh. Fellow Arabs often mock Saudis as rich, lazy, and arrogant.
Saudi Arabia, however, cannot be dismissed as an annoying irrelevance. It is the world's biggest oil exporter, and home to Islam's two holiest sites. It is geographically and culturally central to the Gulf, the Arab region, and the Islamic world. A reformed Saudi Arabia would help stabilize a Middle East in turmoil; failure of reform, in contrast, would destabilize the Gulf region, which generally dodged the upheaval of the Arab spring of 2011.
Prince Muhammad is faced with major problems. Volatile oil revenues make up more than 80% of government income -- and even with higher oil prices, Saudi Arabia is saddled with a painful budget deficit. Although there have been gains in health and education, GDP per person has been flat for decades. The oil money props up a woefully unproductive economy, with most Saudis working soft government jobs, while bankrolling Islamic zealotry around the world.
Prince Muhammad is facing the challenge, but he has made the task difficult for himself. His foreign policy is incoherent. His war against the Houthis, a Shia militia in Yemen has brought misery to Yemenis, a missile war over Saudi cities, and embarrassment to Western allies that provide weapons and other help. Last year Saudi Arabia discredited itself by detaining the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, releasing him only after international protests.
Along with its main ally, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Saudis have isolated Qatar, a contrarian emirate, by cutting land, sea and air links -- the Saudis are even contemplating digging a canal to turn Qatar into an island. The result has been to split the Gulf Cooperation Council, the club of oil monarchies. The Iranians and other foes are the main beneficiaries.
At home, while Prince Muhammad has liberalized social life with one hand, he has ramped up political oppression with the other. The number of executions has risen. More dissenters are in jail -- among them, perversely, women who campaigned to be able to drive. Prince Muhammad's reforms are strictly top-down, with the people expected to gratefully accept what they are given by the royal house, remaining passive and obedient. The Saudis and Emiratis are also leading a counter-revolution against all Islamists, even the non-violent factions, making war upon populist sentiment. The USA blandly endorses almost everything the government does, with such protests as are made amounting to nothing.
Prince Muhammad's efforts to boost the private sector also take the top-down approach. Even the liberalization of entertainment is being performed to a government plan. The prince is fond of "giga-projects", in particular plans to build NEOM, a futuristic city in the northwest. That sort of thing is not new to Saudi Arabia -- but earlier attempts to emulate Dubai have not gone well. The King Abdullah Financial District in Riyadh is largely empty.
Instead of just trying to make Saudi Arabia look like Dubai, Prince Muhammad might better consider making his country act more like it -- by outgrowing the xenophobia; becoming friendly to business; making the government bureaucracy more responsive to the people, and more competent; accelerating the loosening of straightlaced Saudi society; valuing diversity of thought; and above all, becoming a nation run by just laws, instead of the whims of autocrats. The prince's arbitrary decision in 2017 to lock up hundreds of tycoons, officials, and princes in a gilded Saudi hotel last year in an "anti-corruption campaign" made a bad impression on outsiders.
The UAE's federalism might also provide a useful example. Saudi Arabia could not realistically copy the loose union of states that make up the Emirates -- but a degree of devolution would have its attractions, with a relatively relaxed environment in Jeddah, a stricter system in Riyadh, and a looser leash on Shias in the east, with each region performing its own social and economic experiments. Most importantly, it would promote local representation in government.
Prince Muhammad's top-down revolution is undermining the traditional supports of the rule of house of Saud: the princes, clerics, and businessmen. Without a base of support, the Prince is unlikely to get far. He is popular among the young and women, giving him a route towards popular support. At present, he seems more on the path of becoming yet another Arab strongman, whose collective record of success is poor. If Prince Muhammad is serious about reforming Saudi Arabia, he will need to move beyond thinking small about his revolution.
* Low oil prices have helped buoy up the economic boom of the past few years. However, anyone with sense knew that cheap oil wasn't going to last. As discussed by an article from BUSINESSWEEK.com ("Here's What Oil at $70 Means for the World Economy" by Enda Curran, Rich Miller, and Michelle Jamrisko, 9 May 2018), oil prices were up 18% into the spring of 2018, with oil prices now at their highest level since 2014 -- at about $70 USD a barrel.
That means more money for oil producers, but more pain for oil consumers. Exactly how much pain remains to be seen. If the price of oil is being escalated by an inability to meet demand, the rising prices mean trouble; if it's instead being driven by robust demand, it then becomes more of sign of an energetic economy. There are of course other factors involved -- for example, America's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear arms limitation agreement, which has created confusion.
Rising oil prices will drag down household incomes and consumer spending, but the pain won't be spread evenly. Europe is faced with problems, since its economy has been slowing, and many European countries are oil importers. China is the world's biggest importer of oil, and can expect an uptick in inflation. However, to be really painful, oil prices would have to surge higher and stay there. Higher oil prices also mean more interest in alternative fuels, such as biofuels or natural gas, and raise the visibility of electric vehicles.
Of course, Saudi Arabia is a big winner, with high oil prices also boosting Russia, Nigeria, and Colombia. The USA is in an ambiguous position, due to its shale oil boom, which keeps America at the tipping point between net importer and exporter; in addition, while the Trump Administration has a low opinion of energy efficiency, big companies in particular are continually looking to cut their energy costs. The upshot is that rising global oil prices don't bother the US so much.
Nonetheless, poorer Americans are likely to suffer pain, since US oil prices still tend to track the global market, and the poor pay a higher proportion of their income for fuel. Inflation caused by rising oil prices is likely to result in central banks tightening up the money supply by raising interest rates, which also won't do the economy much good. Over the long run, the world will have to kick the oil habit, but that's going to be easier said than done.
* The US shale oil boom has buoyed America's prosperity -- but it has also had negative impact on what is, beyond the border wall, the Trump Administration's most forlorn hope: reviving the coal industry. As discussed by an article from BUSINESSWEEK.con ("Buy Bonds, Kill Coal" by Jim Efstathiou JR and Joe Ryan, 12 June 2018) the fracking boom and the rise of renewable energy, along with environmental concerns, has put coal on a trajectory towards oblivion. Up to 2005, coal provided at least half of America's electricity; now the proportion is a third, and continuing to decline.
While the Trump White House is trying to figure out ways to prop up fading coal power plants, that's not going to be any more than tapping on the brakes for a few years while coal rolls on towards oblivion. Almost two dozen coal plants, with a combined capacity of more than 16 gigawatts, are scheduled to close in 2018. Another 30 gigawatts' worth of plants will follow by the end of 2025.
However, turning off a coal-fired power plant is not as simple as just flipping a switch. Nobody wants to shut down a coal power plant as long as it's still needed; once it's not, it costs money to dismantle it, and also costs to retrain or assist workers for new jobs. The emerging idea is to let utilities issue bonds; the scheme is being discussed in the legislatures of Colorado, New Mexico, and Missouri.
The vision is that no tax dollars would be spent for such bonds, with the debt on the bonds backed by ratepayers, using a surcharge on the utility bill. The yield on the bonds would be low, but they would be high-quality bonds, with an assured return. As costs of renewables continue to decline, the surcharge on customer bills would become less painful -- much less painful if a carbon tax is enacted. However, nobody sees a carbon tax in the USA in the near future.
There are skeptics. Some in the industry don't like the business model, while some environmentalists don't like ratepayers to be footing the bill for shutting down coal -- while letting the utilities get off free for decades of burning the stuff. There is, however, a case for pragmatism: America needs to get out of coal, and a focus on punishing the guilty should not become a distraction from doing the right thing.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AFRICA EVOLUTION (3): African development is largely dependent on three building blocks: electricity, phones, and internet connections. According to Erik Hersman, a founder of several startups in Kenya: "You cannot have a 21st-century economy without power and connectivity -- but if you have those, you can do almost anything else."
Africa is painfully lagging in electricity. It was once called the "dark continent", and it still seems so from orbit at night, where only a scattering of illuminated population centers relieve the darkness. Two-thirds of Africans have no reliable access to electricity. The Africa Progress Panel (APP), a team of experts led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, puts the number of Africans without any power at 620 million, most of them in villages and on farms. The APP also found that in nine African countries, fewer than one in five primary schools had lights.
A study by the World Health Organization found that about a quarter of clinics and hospitals in eleven African countries have no power of any kind, while many of the rest get it from unreliable generators. Power failures can be deadly; it's not too hard to deliver a baby by torchlight if nothing goes wrong with the birth, but it is dangerously problematic if things go wrong. Without electricity, even simple health measures are troublesome. According to Jasper Westerink, who runs the African business of Philips, a Dutch multinational firm: "If you don't have electricity, you don't have a fridge, and if you don't have a fridge, you can't store vaccines."
African businesses are also hobbled by frequent blackouts -- called "dumsor" in Ghana, from the Asante words for "off and on". The businesses have to rely on backup generators, which makes for very expensive electrical power. The rickety power infrastructure limits African economic growth. The World Bank estimates that if they had continuous energy supplies, sub-Saharan Africa's economies could be growing by two percentage points a year faster, on average, than at present. A smaller study of the impact of "dumsor" in Ghana concluded that it could cut the revenue of a business almost in half, and cost the Ghanian economy about 2% of GDP.
As last discussed here in 2015, rapid progress in renewable energy, plus African enterprise, promise solutions. In 2017, Africa added a record 4.4 gigawatts (GW) of renewable-power capacity, about enough to meet Nigeria's current consumption, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). That's partly due to falling costs: the price of solar panels has dropped by more than 80% since 2010, and that of wind turbines is also dropping fast. A recent study led by Anton Eberhard of the University of Cape Town found that grid-connected wind and solar renewable energy in South Africa is now among the world's cheapest.
Africa also has great untapped hydropower potential. Ethiopia is building the Grand Renaissance Dam across the Blue Nile; when the dam is finished a few years from now, it will more than quadruple the country's electricity-generating capacity, from about 2.2 GW to 8.7 GW. The Congo river could support the world's largest hydropower station, with a theoretical output of about 40 GW where it plunges down a set of rapids between Kinshasa, the capital, and the sea. If that dam were built, it would generate 20 times as much power as America's Hoover Dam, enough to light up all of South Africa.
There is also the associated difficulty of setting up a power grid to get the power to users. It can costs thousands of dollars to get power to a house, more than most Africans make in a year. The APP estimates that it would require an expenditure of $63 billion USD a year to get power to all Africans by 2030. Right now, only about $8 billion USD a year is being spent.
As has been discussed here in the past, Africans have been getting around this problem with distributed power. Villagers can buy a cheap solar power system with a solar panel, a battery, and a control unit, with the system able to power four LED lamps, a radio, and a phone charger. Such systems cost a few hundred dollars, more than most Africans can get their hands on -- but the systems are generally sold on a "paygo" model, with customers buying their electricity for, say, 50 cents a day, until the system is paid off. If they don't make payments, the system is shut down until they can pay again.
This model has worked so well that venture capital is pouring into the exercise, with at least a half-dozen firms in the market. The biggest of them, M-Kopa, has electrified more than 500,000 homes and is adding almost 200,000 more a year. About a million homes now have power, with the doubling time running to about 18 months. The falling costs of these systems has accelerated their acceptance: prices for solar-powered LED lamps fell by an estimated 80% between 2010 and 2015, with the cost of a complete home power and appliance system estimated to be cut almost in half by 2020.
These home solar power systems don't generate much electricity. They can run LED lamps and small refrigerators, but they can't run industrial gear, as for a machine shop. However, a growing number of energy-intensive businesses such as mines have been putting up their own solar panel farms to replace diesel generators. Even though solar is still relatively expensive, it's cheaper than generators, and much less trouble to operate. Solar has few moving parts, a switch or two; it also doesn't need fuel, doesn't make noise, and produces no local emissions.
Similar installations have been set up to power villages with "minigrids" -- much cheaper to install than a national power grid. They're not common yet, but experience with them so far they result in a rapid increase in the income of villages. The Smart Villages Initiative, which has brought together scientists from Cambridge and Oxford Universities to get minigrids adopted more widely in poor countries, found that once smallholder farmers have electricity, they quickly adopt a range of other technologies, buying irrigation pumps, and smartphones to get long-term weather forecasts.
A minigrid is still a big investment for a poor village, but innovative business models can help get them installed. The Rockefeller Foundation is exploring whether mobile-phone companies can become anchor customers of minigrids, with the phone companies using them to power their masts -- which they have to do with diesel generators in remote locations. In this model, a minigrid also supports phone and data connectivity. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (22): Article III of the US Constitution defined the Federal judiciary, in three sections. Of course, if the Congress passed laws, the Federal government needed to have a judiciary to pass judgements on those laws; letting the state judiciaries do it would have been asking for trouble. Section 1 of Article III was the judicial "Vesting Clause", granting authority to the Supreme Court:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
END QUOTE
Notice that Section 1 says almost nothing about the organization of the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS). The only stipulation, as expressed in Article I Section 3, is that it will have a "Chief Justice". The organization of the Supreme Court was left to Congress as was, per Article I, the organization of inferior courts, and the apportionment of courts in the different states.
In addition, while Article I gave Congress the right to set its own operating rules, Article III gave the judiciary no such right. The sole stipulation in Section 1 was that there could be only one SCOTUS. Occasional notions of dividing the Supreme Court into multiple panels have never gone anywhere.
The Federal bench, the justices and judges, were to be paid by the government -- to make sure the list of them wasn't restricted to the rich -- and no limit was expressed on their tenure, other than that they behave themselves. This was similar to impeachment on the basis of "high Crimes and Misdemeanors", notably in that it was vague. Although Congress could increase the pay of the justices and judges, Congress could not cut their pay in the course of their tenure. Obviously, that was specified to ensure that Congress could not inflict punitive pay cuts.
* Section 2 outlined the purview of the Federal judiciary, granting it the right to handle various cases under the "Case or Controversy Clause"; the right to handle disputes between states, or between states and foreign nations, under the "Diversity Clause"; certain limitations of the rights of the Federal judiciary under the "Exceptions Clause"; and importantly specified that trials would be by jury:
BEGIN QUOTE:
1: The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;
2: In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
3: The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.
END QUOTE
[TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: Textron Aviation's Cessna organization established something of a standard in single-turboprop utility aircraft with the long-standing Cessna Caravan -- a "flying pickup truck" that has proven useful in the passenger-cargo role; with a sensor turret and light guided weapons, it also makes a pretty good battlefield aircraft. Now Cessna is moving to something bigger and better, developing the twin-turboprop Cessna "SkyCourier" utility aircraft. Federal Express, an enthusiastic user of the Caravan, has up to 100 SkyCouriers on order.
The SkyCourier has configurational similarities to the Caravan: high-mounted rectangular braced wing, tricycle fixed landing gear, with an emphasis on utility and sturdiness. It actually looks more like the classic Twin Otter twin-turboprop utility aircraft, and has little parts commonality with the Caravan. The SkyCourier is to be powered by Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-65 turboprops, with single-point refueling, and will have a Garmin G1000 avionics suite. Maximum range will be 1,665 kilometers (1,035 miles / 900 NMI) and top speed will be 370 KPH (230 MPH / 200 KT).
Maximum payload will be 2,720 kilograms (6,000 pounds); freighter versions will be able to haul three standard LD3 cargo containers, loaded through a large freight door on the rear left fuselage. Passenger liner or combi versions will have 19 passenger seats, along with large cabin windows. Cessna is considering special-mission versions as well. First flight of the SkyCourier will be in 2019, with deliveries to FedEx will start in 2020. List price of the SkyCourier is given as $5.5 million USD.
* As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("US Military Looking At Deploying Anti-missile System In Germany", 1 June 2018), the US military has had preliminary discussions about setting up a "Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)" anti-missile battery in Germany. The primary motivation behind the possible deployment of THAAD to Germany is Iran's ballistic missile program. Iran's Shahab 3 ballistic missiles have a range of 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles), enough to hit southern Europe; the Iranians say the range could be easily extended if necessary.
These discussions are not news, predating US President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, and reflect a broader push to improve Europe's aerospace defenses. A senior German military official cited the need to add more radars across Europe to better track and monitor potential threats, and cue interceptors if needed.
Setting up a THAAD site in Germany could plug a radar gap caused by a two-year delay in completion of a second Aegis Ashore missile defense site in Poland that was initially due to go into service in 2018. No decision has been made to deploy THAAD to Germany. Although the rationale for the US setting up anti-missile defenses in Europe is to protect against missile attacks by Iran or some other "rogue" nation, the Russians have loudly objected to such deployments. The reaction of the Americans and their allies has become predictable: the Russians are given polite reassurances, and then ignored.
* The venerable Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules cargolift aircraft -- last mentioned here in 2017 -- still seems to have a lot of life left in it, as demonstrated by a video from Dorsal Aircraft Corporation (DAC), of Carpinteria, California. Dorsal is working on drone cargolift aircraft, and produced a video of such a machine based on the C-130.
The Drone Hercules replaces the normal C-130 fuselage with a new boxy fuselage, lacking a cockpit, the fuselage having clamshell doors on the rear and belly doors running the length of the fuselage. Three standard 6-meter (20-foot) cargo containers -- standard rail intermodal shipping containers, not aircraft shipping containers -- can be rolled into the open fuselage, then winched into place, rigidly clamped together, with the tail and belly doors closing up for flight.
Dorsal also has schemes for similar aircraft with twin turbofans or quadruple turboprops. The firm claims their concept aircraft would substantially reduce the costs of air cargo transport -- by streamlining processes through elimination of aircrew and use of intermodal containers, and also using the containers as effective structural components of the airframe. It would be interesting to see if this idea pans out.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SEARCH THE SKY QUICKLY: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Global Networks Of Small Telescopes Will Chase Companion Signals Of Gravitational Waves" by Davide Castelvecchi, 13 October 2017), the ground-breaking recent observations of gravitational waves are very encouraging -- but they are uninformative unless the cosmic catastrophes that produced them can be observed in detail. Now a global network of small telescopes is getting into the hunt for such events.
The idea is to spot flares of light originating from the same spot in the sky identified as the source of gravitational waves detected by the US-based Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), or the Virgo observatory near Pisa, Italy. This network of little telescopes will perform scouting, following up cues from gravitational-wave observatories to nail down targets for observation by much larger telescopes.
The key is getting on target quickly. Gravitational wave observatories can't give a precise direction, meaning a large patch of sky has to be searched in no more than a few days, before the violent event that caused the gravitational wave fades out. According to Danny Steeghs, an astronomer at the University of Warwick in the UK: "You need to look at a lot of sky, and you don't have a lot of time for it."
Steeghs heads a small UK-Australian collaboration that built the "Gravitational wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO)" in La Palma, Spain. It a robotic array of small telescopes -- four of them today, eventually eight, possibly sixteen. GOTO uses machine-learning algorithms to help with its search, and stays in communications with similar arrays elsewhere. To date, it's cost about 800,000 GBP, or about a million USD. That's not a lot of money for a serious science project.
Alan Watson of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City and his collaborators were even thriftier. They built the "Deca-Degree Optical Transient Imager (DDOTI)" -- a pair of robotic telescopes at Sierra San Pedro Martir in Mexico -- for only $350,000 USD, using off-the-shelf technology. They'd like to scale up to six telescopes; then ultimately set up similar arrays in France and Australia.
The VIRGO collaboration is involved in the hunt, via a Dutch-funded project called BlackGEM. It will initially consist of three telescopes in La Silla, Chile, at a cost of about 6 million euros ($7.1 million USD), with the telescopes scanning the southern sky to build up an image database. Given an alert from a gravitational wave observatory, BlackGEM will zero in on the target region of sky, looking for something that's changed relative to the database imagery.
Some old telescopes have also been modified as spotters -- for example, the classic 1.2-meter (48-inch) Oschin Schmidt telescope at Mount Palomar in California, which has been in operation since 1948. The Oschin telescope is now part of the "Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH)" network, consisting of 17 inter-communicating facilities around the globe that can track a patch of sky around the clock.
As GROWTH's name implies, not all these systems were set up strictly to track down sources of gravitational waves, having been originally set up to were originally set up to spot other transient phenomena -- celestial gamma-ray bursts, supernovas, near-Earth asteroids -- possibly being cued by alerts from observatories hunting for cosmic particles, such as high-energy neutrinos or cosmic rays.
One such system the "Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON)", in operation since 2016, got an alert on 22 September 2017 from IceCube, the world's largest neutrino observatory, at the South Pole. On following up the cue, AMON researchers found that a known quasar was flaring up. Eventually, astronomers would like to achieve a higher degree of networking, with arrays of telescopes obtaining alerts from gravitational wave and particle observatories, as well as communicating with each other. The sky is vast; astronomers trying to pick out significant events in the sea of stars and galaxies need all the help they can get.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* OUT OF THE DEEP EARTH: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Pockets Of Water May Lie Deep Below Earth's Surface" by Sid Perkins, 8 March 2018), analysis of diamonds that had been driven up from hundreds of kilometers below the surface of the Earth suggests the existence of pockets of water at those depths. The research, which also found an unusual form of crystallized water known as "ice VII", suggests there may be more freely circulating water in the depths of the Earth than previously thought. That finding may influence models of plate tectonics, and of heat flow through the Earth.
Pure diamonds are pure carbon, but in the real world, they're not pure, typically containing small impurities in the form of tiny crystals. According to Oliver Tschauner -- a mineralogist at University of Nevada in Las Vegas -- such inclusions yield clues about how and where the gems formed. In a 2016 study, for example, metal-rich inclusions found in dozens of large, clear diamonds suggested that those gemstones formed in pockets of liquid metal.
Tschauner and his colleagues recently analyzed diamonds unearthed at several sites in southern Africa and China, to find that more than a dozen of them contained an unfamiliar inclusion: ice VII. Incidentally, researchers know of more than a dozen water ice configurations, including "ice IX" -- which actually isn't anything like Kurt Vonnegut's fictional doomsday ice IX, capable of causing the world's oceans to freeze solid in a chain reaction. Ice VII is well-known from lab studies of materials under high pressure, but the diamonds contain the first natural samples. In consequence, ice VII has been declared a new mineral.
Tschauner says that the ice VII in the diamonds hints at pockets of water deep in the Earth's mantle. It is known that there is plenty of water inside the Earth, but it's been traditionally been seen as chemically bound in rocks in "hydrated" minerals. The water in the diamonds, however, is unbonded and a liquid, despite the high temperatures found in the Earth's mantle.
The researchers believe some of the diamonds they studied formed at depths between 610 and 800 kilometers (380 and 495 miles), and is the first evidence of water at such depths. However, the research doesn't indicate how big or common those water deposits are. Tschauner says the diamonds also included tiny crystals of calcite and various types of salts, suggesting the diamonds formed in pockets of watery, salty fluid.
Oded Navon -- a mantle geochemist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem -- believes that the presence of watery fluids at those depths could affect how and where heat is generated in the mantle. For example, such watery fluids could more readily carry certain forms of easily dissolved radioactive elements from one part of the mantle to another, causing heating from their decay in regions where they accumulate. Such heated regions would be less viscous, and could influence the rate at which heat flows to the surface of the planet.
Tschauner and his team similarly point out that the density and viscosity of Earth's interior affect the level at which sinking tectonic slabs reach neutral buoyancy, stalling their descent. That, in turn, influences where the slabs melt and release the water and other minerals they hold. The researchers believe their study will help refine models of the Earth's interior.
* In related science news, as discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Diamond-Studded Meteorites Came From The Collision Of A Lost Planet" by Sid Perkins, 17 April 2018), in the early days of the Solar System, a multitude of worlds coalesced out of a primordial cloud of gas and dust. There were so many worlds that they often spectacularly smashed into each other -- forming larger worlds, or scattering pieces of themselves into space. Some of those pieces survive today as carbon-rich asteroids. In 2008, one such asteroid broke apart in the Earth's atmosphere, its fragments falling to the ground. Examination of some of those fragments suggest they may be remnants of one of the shattered worlds of the early Solar System.
The Almahata Sitta meteorites -- a few hundred rock fragments that rained down on Sudan's Nubian Desert -- included a number of coarse-grained, carbon-rich fragments known as "ureilites". Examination showed the contained tiny diamonds that presumably measured up to 100 micrometers across when they originally formed. That's at least 100 times bigger than the nanodiamonds that form when planetary objects collide, and far larger than diamonds that form by condensing from carbon vapor inside clouds of interplanetary gas and dust.
A new study suggests that the Almahata Sitta meteorites featured the large fragments because they originated deep in the core of a primordial world that was then blasted apart in a collision. Just how big a planet? Small blebs of iron-rich sulfides inside these meteorites' diamonds provide key clues. Because the minerals could only have formed at pressures about 200,000 times those of Earth's atmosphere at sea level, the diamonds would have formed near the center of a Mercury-or-larger-size protoplanet. Alternatively, they could have formed just outside the metal-rich core of a Mars-or-larger-size body.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AFRICA EVOLUTION (2): While technology has been gaining ground in Africa, it's not doing so at the same pace as in the developed world, so the gap is currently widening. According to Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, Ghana's science and technology minister: "The poverty gap is a technology gap." There's an associated knowledge and education gap, the quality of schooling across Africa being notoriously poor, teachers being ill-trained or negligent. If the education system can't prepare students for tech jobs, Africa will fall even further behind.
Technology, however, is helping with education. At a school in Uganda, each teacher works from a tablet that has scripted lessons. The lessons are provided by Bridge International Academies, a schooling network operating across a number of African countries -- founded by three Harvard graduates and headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. Not only does the tablet provide materials for a teacher to work from; it also allows Bridge to monitor a teacher's attendance and progress. A study showed that in Liberia, students learned as much in a year as students in state schools could in two.
Using tech to teach students on their own helps as well, with a number of firms working towards that end. At the low end of the cost scale is Eneza Education, a Kenyan firm that allows students to take mock tests using text messaging on basic mobile phones; at the high end is the Kio Kit, based on a rugged tablet computer that kids can use in the classroom. Most of this work is just getting started, so there's not much history to see how well it will work, but studies show that even modest applications of technology to education in Africa show clear results.
What boosts the technology exercise is that it is self-perpetuating: students who bootstrap themselves with the tech may end up developing more tech. For example, a visit to a tech hub in Lagos, Nigeria, reveals enthusiastic kids coding away on laptop computers, sharpening skills they may have picked up from online portals such as Udacity, or by watching YouTube videos.
Jean-Claude Bastos -- who sponsors an annual innovation prize in Africa, as well as a tech hub in the slums of Luanda, Angola -- recalls that, when he put a 3D printer in the Luanda hub, he was startled to see the first thing the kids did with it was dismantle it. He was quickly reassured: "They took it apart, then put it back together, then did it again. Now if anything in it breaks they rebuild it on intuition, like it is a motorbike or car."
Africa can greatly benefit from technology even if it's not the whizziest thing on the market; 21st-century technology tends to be very smart, and even low-cost tools may be capable and flexible. Africa has big problems: weak state-run education systems, widespread disease, broken infrastructure, and low productivity on farms and in factories. Mobile phones were revolutionary in Africa because, for hundreds of millions of people, they were the first and only form of telecommunication available. Telecommunications had become established in developed countries over the course of a century, while the great leap for Africa took place in a few decades.
Technology, of course, doesn't just mean mobile phones and tablets; 21st-century biomedical technology can buy a lot for Africa, and it doesn't have to be leading-edge, either. As Bill Gates -- of course, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds development work in the undeveloped world -- comments: "Investments in health R&D for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases will be a massive boon for poor countries where the disease burden is highest. The same is true for innovations like better seeds that enable poor farmers to increase crop yields." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (21): Section 4 of Article II is brief, only one clause, the executive "Impeachments Clause":
BEGIN QUOTE:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
END QUOTE
Section 4 declared that the president, vice president, and all other civil officials of the Federal government could be removed from office for malfeasance, through impeachment by Congress. The impeachment process was defined in Article I, being glossed over then to be discussed here.
Impeachment isn't complicated on the face of it: the House could indict a president, or other Federal official, by a simple majority vote -- the Constitution doesn't actually specify that, but it's the implied default -- with the Senate then passing judgement, a two-thirds majority being required for conviction. The chief justice of the Supreme Court would preside over the Senate for the impeachment proceedings; it wouldn't do for the vice president to continue to preside over the Senate during an impeachment, since the vice president would move into the seat of an impeached president. That was a particularly troublesome notion in light of the electoral process originally set up in the Constitution, in which the president and vice president might well be political rivals.
The first trick with the impeachment process is that "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" is vague. In practice, as explained by Gerry Ford -- the 38th POTUS -- in 1974: "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." That's the only rule in the matter; there's no appeal against the House decision to impeach. However, the 2/3rds Senate majority required for impeachment makes a conviction very difficult, and it's never actually happened.
Richard Nixon, POTUS 37, resigned in the face of certain removal from office, with that precedent suggesting any president in the future who is faced with removal would resign as well. A president in that much trouble is too compromised to function, and has no good motive to try to tough it out. Nixon got a pardon by Gerry Ford after he resigned -- suggesting an unwritten and implicit deal, never actually proven, in which Nixon would resign for the good of the country, with the government then leaving him alone. If there was such a deal, it made sense; no use in going through all the political chaos of an impeachment if the president could be persuaded to simply go. The government had more constructive things to do.
On the other side of that coin, attempts to push impeachment through the House when there's no prospect of a conviction in the Senate end up being frivolous political propaganda exercises -- as was the case with the effort to impeach Bill Clinton, POTUS 42, for personal misconduct.
* Incidentally, it is slightly puzzling that the USA has a "president" and not a "governor". At the time of the Philadelphia Convention, most of the states had "governors" with top executive authority, only a handful of states having a "president" in that position. All "president" means is the "presiding officer" of an assembly, not in itself implying any real authority. During early deliberations of the convention, some of the members labeled the chief executive the "governor".
So why did the term "president" win out in the end? Nobody actually knows for sure, but it may have due to a sly agenda on the part of the Federalists. First, using the term "governor" could have implied to states reluctant to ratify the Constitution that the central government would indeed "govern" them -- with the term "president" instead providing some reassurance that the states retained their internal sovereignty.
Second, George Washington was the president, the presiding officer, of the Philadelphia Convention; being held in such extraordinary esteem, the association with Washington was also reassuring to states reluctant to ratify. Certainly, there was never much doubt as to who the first president was going to be; and his public prestige was such that nobody with sense dared attack him. The Federalists used "president" to stack the deck in their favor. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for June included:
-- 02 JUN 18 / GAOFEN 6, LUOJIA 1 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0413 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 6" and "Luojia 1" civil Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. The 1,065-kilogram (2,345-pound) Gaofen 6 added to China's Gaofen environmental satellite constellation. Gaofen 6 was an upgraded version of the Gaofen 1 satellite, launched in 2013. The Luojia 1 satellite was an experimental remote-sensing satellite.
-- 04 JUN 18 / SES 12 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 4:45 UTC (local time + 4) , carrying the "SES 12" geostationary comsat for SES of Luxembourg. The satellite was built by Airbus Defense and Space, and was based on the E3000e satellite platform, with electric propulsion; it had a launch mass of 5,400 kilograms (11,900 pounds), a payload of 76 Ka / Ku-band transponders, and a design life of 15 years.
SES 12 was placed in the geostationary slot at 95 degrees east longitude to provide direct-to-home broadcast and other high-throughput communications services in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. The Falcon 9 first stage had been used on a previous flight; it was not recovered on the second launch, since it was early technology, not intended for more than two flights. This was the 53rd flight of the Falcon 9.
-- 05 JUN 18 / FENGYUN 2H -- A Long March 3A booster was launched from Xichang at 1307 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Fengyun 2H" geostationary weather satellite into orbit for the China Meteorological Administration.
-- 06 JUN 18 / SOYUZ ISS 55S (ISS) -- A Soyuz Fregat booster was launched from Baikonur at 1112 UTC (local time + 6) to put the "Soyuz ISS 55S" AKA "Soyuz MS-09" crewed space capsule into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) support mission. The crew included vehicle commander Sergey Prokopyev of the RKA (1st space flight), co-pilot Alexander Gerst of Germany / ESA (2nd space flight), and Serena Aunon-Chancellor of NASA (1st space flight). The capsule docked with the ISS Earth-facing Rassvet module two days after launch, with the Soyuz crew joining the "ISS Expedition 56" crew of commander Drew Feustel, flight engineer Ricky Arnold, and cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev.
-- 12 JUN 18 / IGS RADAR 6 -- A JAXA H2A booster was launched from Tanegashima at 0420 UTC (local time - 9) to put an "Information Gathering Satellite (IGS)" radar-imaging military surveillance satellite into orbit. This was the "IGS Radar 6" satellite of the IGS series, with a synthetic aperture radar; it was actually the eighth IGS radar satellite to be launched -- including one lost on launch, and another being an unnumbered spare. IGS Radar 6 was the 16th IGS satellite, from initial launch in 2003:
All the IGS satellites were built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
-- 16 JUN 18 / GLONASS M (COSMOS 2527) -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 2146 UTC (next day local time - 4) to put a GLONASS M navigation satellite into orbit. It was assigned the series designation of "Cosmos 2527".
-- 27 JUN 18 / XJSS A,B -- A Chinese Long March 2C booster was launched from Xichang at 0330 UTC (local time - 8) to put an undisclosed dual payload into orbit. The two satellites, designated "XJSS A" and "XJSS B", were not described beyond an announcement that they were to test Earth observation and inter-satellite communications link technology. They were presumably secret military payloads.
-- 29 JUN 18 / SPACEX DRAGON CRS 15 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0942 UTC (local time + 4), carrying the 15th operational "Dragon" cargo capsule to the International Space Station (ISS). It docked with the ISS Harmony module three days after launch. Payloads included:
Six CubeSats were also flown on the capsule, to be later deployed from the ISS. Three of them made up the "Biarri-Squad" constellation, flown under the multinational Biarri project to study potential military applications for constellations of small spacecraft. A partnership between the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, Biarri-Squad was based on three-unit CubeSat buses, and built by Boeing under the US National Reconnaissance Office's "Colony 2" program.
The three CubeSats followed Biarri-Point, a risk-reduction satellite that was deployed from the ISS in May 2017. Biarri-Squad used L1 GPS receivers and laser ranging to make precise measurements of the satellites' relative positions. Australia's Electro-Optic Systems (EOS) performed the laser ranging experiments, relying upon retroreflectors aboard each CubeSat.
The other three CubeSats were flown under the Japanese-led multinational "Birds 2" project, consisting of small satellites with Earth imaging, radio and technology demonstration payloads. The original Birds constellation, consisting of five satellites, was deployed from the ISS in July 2017.
Each Bird satellite was a one-unit (1U) CubeSat, built by Japan's Kyushu Institute of Technology (KIT), in partnership with other universities and organizations around the world, the satellites were to return images of the Earth, be used by amateur radio enthusiasts, and test microcontroller systems in orbit. Birds-2 consisted of spacecraft built in partnership with universities in Bhutan ("Bhutan 1"), the Philippines ("Maya 1"), and Malaysia ("Universiti Teknologi MARA Sat 1 / UiTMSAT-1"). Bhutan 1 was the Kingdom of Bhutan's first satellite, while Maya 1 was the Philippines' first CubeSat -- though not the Philippines' first satellite.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCAN EVERYTHING: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New 3D Scanning Campaign Will Reveal 20,000 Animals In Stunning Detail" by Ryan Cross, 24 August 2017), the 21st century is the era of Big Data science, with researchers seeking to squeeze data out of everything they can get their hands on.
For a striking example, consider biomechanist Adam Summers -- of Friday Harbor Laboratories, on San Juan Island in Washington State -- got into the hobby of having fish preserved in jars given computerized tomography (CT) scans two decades ago. It was an informal exercise at the outset: "I literally traded Snickers bars for CT scans when I started out."
The CT scans gave Summers a virtual 3D window into the anatomy of the fishes. He would post the skeletons online, to become known as the "Fish Guy". Only half-joking, he said he was going to scan all the fishes in the world. In 2015, Summers got his own CT scanner and started to get serious about doing exactly that. He figured out how to scan multiple fishes at once, wrapping them in alcohol-soaked cheesecloth to keep them from drying out, then stacking them up in the CT scanner. At last count, he had more than 4,500 specimens from 2,400 different species.
Still, that was thinking small. In 2016, David Blackburn -- a herpetologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville -- crossed paths with Summers on Twitter, Blackburn saying he wanted to "scan all frogs". The two got their heads together, then wondered: "Why not scan it all?" They obtained a $2.5 million USD grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to set up the "Open Exploration of Vertebrate Diversity in 3D (oVert)" program, sometimes called simply the "scan all vertebrates" project.
Over the next few years, Blackburn will direct an effort to CT scan more than 20,000 vertebrate specimens, representing 80% of all genera, from 16 museum and university collections across the USA. About a thousand of the samples will be soaked in iodine dye, which enhances contrast in in soft tissues, allowing inspection of muscles, circulatory system, brain, and more. The resulting 3D renderings will be uploaded to an existing digital depository named MorphoSource -- created by Doug Boyer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. This will give researchers in fields such as comparative anatomy, evolution, developmental biology, and biomimetics unprecedented access to data on vertebrate anatomy.
The CT scans Summers has made of fish are already proving valuable:
Blackburn has found that scans will reveal details of an animal's diet; on scanning frogs, he found remains of ants, crabs, and even another frog in their stomachs. Blackburn says that scans are particular useful in examining the anatomy of rare vertebrates only known from one or two specimens, since nobody would dare take them apart. Kara Yopak of the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, the neuroanatomy adviser to oVert, says that the project will "open new doors" for understanding brain evolution in hard-to-find species,
Of the 16 universities that are participating in oVert, six have CT scanners, and will handle the scanning. Four researchers are leading a hunt for appropriate bird and mammal specimens, which is troublesome since animals are typically mounted as dry taxidermy -- not preserved in fluid, which is common for reptiles, amphibians, and fish -- and so not very useful for CT scanning. Education and outreach is a major goal of oVert. Bruce McFadden, vertebrate paleontology curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, wants to use the 3D models in K-12 education.
Doug Boyer is excited at the potential of oVert: "Everything we thought we knew about anatomical evolution, throw it out the window. This will be at such a different scale, we will have to go into it with new eyes."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CARBON CAPTURE: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Cost Plunges For Capturing Carbon Dioxide From The Air" by Robert F. Service, 7 June 2018), the idea of pulling carbon dioxide from the air and using it to synthesize fuel -- last discussed here in 2016 -- has suffered from high costs. Now a study, based on operation of a pilot facility, suggests the costs of CO2 capture-synthesis might be cut by a factor of six.
David Keith, a physicist at Harvard University, co-founded a company named "Carbon Engineering" to investigate "direct air capture (DAC)" of CO2. In 2015, the firm set up a DAC plant in British Columbia, which extracts a tonne of CO2 a day, operating in a cycle:
It may sound complicated, but it's all straightforward industrial chemistry. The contractor was obtained from factory cooling towers; the pellet reactor came from water-treatment plants; the calciner was developed from metal-ore purification apparatus; and the slaker was adapted from pulp mills. All the kit for the demonstrator system was obtained off-the-shelf. A full-scale plant could extract from 100,000 to a million tonnes of CO2 a year.
The company also built a pilot operation to turn captured CO2 into a range of liquid fuels, including gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. In the process an electrolyzer, powered by renewable energy, splits water into hydrogen and oxygen; the H2 is then combined with CO2 to generate the desired fuel. The process is efficient and competitive with normal hydrocarbon fuels, as long as the CO2 is cheap.
According to estimates of the DAC system, it would be able to produce a tonne of CO2 at a cost of roughly $100 to $250 USD, as compared to $600 USD for processes envisioned earlier. Keith believes the process can be made even cheaper -- and of course, it is likely there would be economies of scale once the such DAC plants became commonplace.
The push for low-carbon fuel regulations would be a boost to widespread adoption. California adopted such standards in 2007, with the European Union following in 2009. California's requirement is effectively a cap-and-trade scheme, translates to a price of $165 per tonne of CO2 -- making Carbon Engineering's product entirely competitive. Steve Oldham, the company's CEO, says ground is to be broken on the first industrial-scale plant before the end of 2018.
The new capture scheme seems encouraging, but it would require the expenditure of trillions of dollars to capture the up to 10 billion tonnes of CO2 required to head off global warming. Oldham says the company is likely to focus on licensing the technology to others at good terms to other firms. Nonetheless, it's not commercially proven technology, and the political environment for carbon capture, at least in Washington DC, is unpromising, at least for the time being. Caution is warranted; though on the other side of the coin, the ingenuity being pumped into the battle against climate change suggests other promising new technologies will emerge in time.
* And on that note, I ran across an older article from THEONION.com ("Scientists Politely Remind World That Clean Energy Technology Ready To Go Whenever", 21 May 2014) that seems apropos here:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Stating that they just want to make sure it's something everyone keeps in mind going forward, an international consortium of scientists gently reminded the world Wednesday that clean energy technologies are pretty much ready to go anytime. "We've got solar, wind, geothermal -- we're all set to move forward with this stuff whenever everyone else is," said Dr. Sandra Eakins, adding that researchers are also doing a lot of pretty amazing things with biomass these days.
She added: "Again, we're good to go on this end, so just let us know. You seriously should see these new hydrogen fuel cells we have. Anyway, just say the word, and we'll start rolling it out."
At press time, representatives from the world's leading economies had signaled that they would continue to heavily rely on fossil fuels until they had something more than an overwhelming scientific consensus to go on.
END QUOTE
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AFRICA EVOLUTION (1): A survey presented here in 2013 concluded that Africa has come a long way since the turn of the century. A 2017 survey from ECONOMIST.com ("The Leapfrog Model", 9 November 2017) started out on a much more pessimistic note, using the negative example of the Central African Republic (CAR), bogged down in a fight with Islamic militancy. Anyone visiting the CAR -- not a great idea -- would see a country as an earthly version of Hell, confirming the impression that Africa is mired in poverty, misgovernance, and warfare.
That impression is, on a continental scale, misleading. The CAR is the exception of an Africa in the rush of a technological, commercial, and social revolution that gives a solid basis for the optimistic view. A decade ago, mobile phones swept the continent, giving hundreds of millions of people instant communications and access to data. It was like turning on the lights in a dark room. Services like M-Pesa, which allowed people to send money by phone, gave poor people a bank account in their pocket, and enabled other innovations. By lowering transaction costs, "mobile money" allowed lenders to easily assess credit risks, borrows to asses lenders, insurers to sell insurance in parcels, and energy firms to sell electricity by the day or week.
Some of these innovations are coming out of the thriving tech hubs in Nairobi and elsewhere in Africa -- discussed here in 2012 -- but the majority of the tech comes from elsewhere. For example, the $50 USD smartphones that connect motorcycle taxis and customers in Rwanda are Chinese. However, it is Africans who leverage off foreign technologies to generate African solutions. If a farmer needs to find a truck to haul a cow, or a sick worker needs an ambulance to get to a hospital, an African startup company can provide the service.
For an example from the field of medicine, consider Dougbeh Chris Nyan -- Liberian-born, German-educated, who spent most of his professional career in the USA, developing tests for infectious diseases. Nyan moved back to Liberia during the Ebola epidemic there in 2014:2015, and has since worked with researchers both in Liberia and in America to develop a battery-powered gadget that can cheaply and easily test for six different infections at once. It is unusual in the developed world to see a patient with multiple infections such as malaria, yellow fever, and HIV; it's not so unusual in Africa. Nyan describes his gadget as an "Africa-induced innovation. We are forced to be inventive to become masters of our destitution."
Although some of the funding for African innovation comes from foreign non-governmental organizations (NGO), the majority comes from investors after a return on investment. In 2016, African tech firms raised $367 million USD in capital; although that's petty cash compared to Silicon Valley, it's still been enough to set up firms like Flutterwave, a Nigerian payments company, and Zipline, which uses drones to fly blood to clinics in Rwanda.
To some critics, the idea that Africa can make the great leap is preposterous. Hundreds of millions of Africans don't have electricity or safe drinking water, much less phones and the internet. African governance has been improving, but there's still much corruption and misrule. The continent's population is growing at 3% a year -- while as of late, GDP has only grown by 1.4%. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (20): Section 3 of Article II required the president to keep Congress informed, under the "State of the Union Clause"; to recommend actions of Congress, under the "Recommendations Clause"; to receive ambassadors, under the "Reception Clause"; to see that the laws are executed, under the "Take Care Clause" AKA "Faithful Execution Clause"; and to commission government officials:
BEGIN QUOTE:
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
END QUOTE
The president is obligated to give Congress a "State of the Union" address periodically, with custom establishing the period as yearly. Although the president doesn't establish laws as such -- presidential enactments are authorized as expressions of existing law, not exactly laws themselves -- the president has an influential power under the Recommendations Clause to propose laws to Congress, and encourage their enactment. As the saying goes: "The president proposes, the Congress disposes."
The relationship between the executive and Congress is somewhat tilted in favor of Congress. The president is not in a strong position to push back on passage of laws by Congress. Furthermore, if a president wishes to take an action in defiance of Congress, Congress can withhold the necessary funds for that action. Budgets in practice are on a line-item basis, with funds allocated for specific needs -- and a president cannot loot funds authorized for one purpose for an unauthorized activity. The "power of the purse" gives Congress substantial power over the president; the president has no such comparable power over Congress.
However, if a president simply refuses to implement a law, or pretends to implement it and does little or nothing, Congress doesn't have a lot of leverage to compel obedience. Of course, a president that spites Congress will end up with a Congress inclined to spite the president in return -- but if Congress is spiteful anyway, the president has little to lose by reciprocating.
As a footnote, the president also has the authority to call special sessions of Congress in the face of an emergency. With modern air travel, Congress is always in session except for short breaks -- with members of Congress certain to rush back to Washington DC if there's a crisis and they're out of town -- so this isn't much of an issue any more. The last time there was a special session of Congress was in 1948; Harry Truman, POTUS 33, called the special session as what amounted to a publicity stunt for the upcoming presidential election.
At the core of the job, the president will deal with foreign ambassadors -- more broadly meaning, conduct foreign policy -- ensure the execution of laws. There was talk during the Philadelphia Convention of giving the Senate the lead in foreign policy, but that was rightly judged impractical, and the president has great discretion over foreign policy. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from SPECTRUM.IEEE.org ("Modular Power Blocks Snap Together to Scale Up Energy Needs in Remote Areas" by Tracy Staedter, 1 December 2017), the spread of low-cost solar panels in the undeveloped world, particularly Africa, has been almost revolution -- but energy storage has been a problem. Car batteries are used, but they're not a particularly adequate solution.
A startup firm named Power-Blox, of Brugg in Switzerland, is now producing an energy storage scheme based on, of course, Power-Blox -- which are 1.2-kilowatt-hour (kWH) battery cubes to store solar or wind energy, that snap together like Lego blocks. A cube can deliver a maximum of 200 watts. Each cube is "smart", with the cubes collaborating in a "swarm" to ensure balanced power flow, compensating for a cube that has malfunction or been unplugged. One cube can support a household, while an array of them can support a village microgrid.
Power-Blox comes in either a lithium-ion battery version -- for about $2,800 USD, with a warranty of five years -- or a lead-acid version -- for about $1,800 USD, with a warranty of two years. The company is now working on a distributed monitoring-control scheme, and on a blockchain scheme to manage an electrical trading system that will allow microgrid users to buy and sell electricity among each other. The company is also developing packaged products based on the cubes, such as one with a charging station that can recharge up to 30 mobile phones, recharge electric motorbikes, or run a small restaurant; a power unit with a refrigerator to keep drinks cold; or a power unit with a water purification system.
GreenVentures -- a Dutch startup company specializing in renewables, which has installed more than 250 megawatts of renewable power all over the world -- has launched a for-profit social enterprise named "FlexGrid" that's using Power-Blox to build an off-grid solution for rural villages. With a grant from the European funding body ElectriFi, Greenventures has set up a pilot site in a remote community in southern Mali.
The microgrid consists of five "PowerHubs" -- locked metal sheds about a meter square and two meters tall -- each topped with a solar panel. Inside, the space can accommodate up to eight Power-Blox cubes, which can be installed without any special training. One cube can serve the modest electrical needs -- powering LED lamps, charging a cellphone, running a TV -- of eight households in the village. The five hubs are linked together, and automatically balance their electrical load.
GreenVentures has plans to install 50 additional FlexGrids in Mali in 2018, bringing electricity to about 6,500 households in 12 months' time. By 2019, they hope to expand that to 500 villages. Users will be charged a fixed rate on a tiered structure, aligned with their ability to pay. The most expensive tier will cost about 3 euros per month ($3.50 USD). For comparison, two candles with a month's worth of kerosene fuel costs around 9 euros ($10.60 USD). People will pay for the electricity using an SMS-based payment system already popular in Africa, where most people do not have formal bank accounts.
* As discussed by an article from WIRED.com ("Nuro's Self-Driving R-1 Doesn't Drive You -- It Drives Your Stuff" by Alex Davies, 30 January 2018), there's an increasing realization that the age of the fully autonomous, go-anywhere robocar is not right around the corner. The response, of course, is: so what? There's a lot that can be done short of that goal.
Consider the newborn Silicon Valley startup company named Nuro, founded by Dave Ferguson -- an alumnus of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute and with long experience in autonomous vehicles -- and Jiajun Zhu, a Google AI veteran. Instead of trying to build a robocar to drive humans around, they came up with the "R-1", which is a little robot delivery vehicle.
The R-1 is a pure electric vehicle, about the height of a mid-sized passenger car, but only about half as wide, and is about as long as a Smart car. It navigates using a suite of sensors -- cameras, radars, and a spinning lidar unit mounted up top. The R-1 has two cargo compartments that can be kitted up to carry specialized loads: bags of groceries, flowers, pizzas, whatever.
Ferguson says the commercial delivery market seemed promising for three reasons: it had a lot of applicability, it presented a sustainable business model, and it could be done in three to five years. The firm has challenges, one being to certify vehicles that not only don't have a driver, they don't even carry passengers -- and so don't have things required by regulation like seat belts and airbags. The company also has to work out a business model -- options including contracting with specific restaurants or businesses, or running packages the last mile between distribution centers and their final destination.
* The US 4th of July Independence Day celebration usually involves public fireworks displays. However, increased and thoroughly justified worries about starting wildfires has led to bans on fireworks in the western USA. As a result, this 4th of July, a number of western US municipalities put on displays using illuminated constellations of drones.
This sounds like the way of the future -- yes, the drones are relatively expensive, but they can be re-used. Once drone displays become common, it is likely that the same concept will migrate to private hands. One could imagine, say, LED-illuminated gliders launched by slingshot, possible fitted with whistles or sirens to make noise.
Certainly, fireworks don't have much of a future. I was out for my morning walk in Loveland CO on 5 July, to find two cop cars at a house, with three or four young guys sitting on the ground, being reprimanded by the cops. I picked up my pace to get away from the scene, not seeing any benefit to myself in hanging around -- but as I walked away, I could hear the cops saying something about fireworks. It appears the authorities here are becoming very hard-nosed about enforcing the city fireworks ban.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NOT THAT SIMPLE: The libertarian assault on the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) was discussed here in 2017. As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Freedom And Pharmaceuticals", 9 June 2018), libertarians are making a bit of headway against the FDA. The article starts out with:
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On May 30th, surrounded by patients and their families, President Donald Trump signed into law the spectacularly misnamed "right to try" legislation. The new law appears to offer terminally ill patients the right to get experimental new drugs that might save their lives. In fact, it does no such thing. Sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, pen in hand, Mr. Trump predicted it would save "hundreds of thousands" of lives. It will not do that, either.
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The idea behind right-to-try laws (RTTL) is to bypass the FDA when terminally ill patients want access to an unproven medicine. That sounds perfectly reasonable; but the reality is that it's a fix for something that isn't broken. The FDA already receives about a thousand such applications a year, and approves all but about a percent of them. The agency makes sure it's not ridiculous to think the drug might work, and that the drug isn't harmful. In fact, sometimes the agency's wonks recommend more promising treatments.
RTTL cuts all of this stuffy FDA bureaucracy out of the loop. The law was pushed through by the efforts of the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in Arizona. It's been pushing RTTL over about four years, with RTTL now found in 40 states. Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at NYU School of Medicine in New York, believes he can think of maybe one person who it might have helped.
Pharmaceutical firms are not enthusiastic about RTTL. True, the law does give them legal cover if an experimental drug ends up killing or harming a terminal patient. However, as Caplan points out, such "adverse" events are likely to make pharma firms publicly look bad. The public is already deeply suspicious of the pharma industry, and the companies don't want embarrassments that will hurt them on Wall Street. As a result, some pharma firms will not authorize the use of drugs that haven't been given the cover of FDA approval.
Besides, supplies of experimental drugs tend to be limited, since they're not in mass production yet, being only manufactured for trials -- with RTTL complicating trials. Experimental drugs are certain to be expensive, and insurers of course won't cover them. As discussed in the earlier series, it's also unlikely they'll do any good, since most new drugs turn out to be ineffective, or at least no more effective than proven drugs.
Critics of RTTL suggest that it's being most heavily pushed by dubious operators expecting to make fast money off of the terminally ill. Is it any coincidence that the loudest critics of the FDA are peddlers of quack medicines? Indeed, any examination of the libertarian assault on regulation suggests it's far more about profits than about promoting the public interest -- a concept which libertarians are disingenuously inclined to denounce as fraudulent.
The critics also say the Goldwater Institute is likely to move on to further efforts to undermine the FDA. Starlee Coleman, a policy adviser for the organization, says RTTL isn't an "opening salvo" -- but she adds that the institute is now working to permit use of drugs for ailments for when they have not been approved. There are known risks to such "off label" use, so the FDA prohibits it. Of course, Coleman knows better than the FDA: "We think that is silly."
* In related news, as reported by an article from REUTERS.com ("Drugmakers Try Evasion, Tougher Negotiations To Fight New US Insurer Tactic" by Michael Erman & Caroline Humer, 5 July 2018), while Big Pharma has been notoriously raising drug prices in recent years, insurers are figuring out how to fight back -- and Big Pharma doesn't like it at all.
Insurers tried to cope with inflating drug prices by pushing patients towards less expensive treatments, through the simple measure of making them pay a higher portion of a drug's costs. Drugmakers shot back by dramatically raising the financial aid they offer patients -- via "copay assistance" cards, similar to a debit card, that provide a discount on the drugs.
As pointed out by officials of Express Scripts Holding Company and CVS Health -- both of which manage prescription drug coverage for large US employers -- as the insurers raised the portion passed on to customers, the pharma companies then paid the patients off with copay assistance cards, leaving the insurers still stuck with the same bill. In 2018, Express Scripts and others introduced a new "copay accumulator" approach for its corporate customers to neutralize copay assistance cards. It's simple, the insurers just raise the out-of-pocket limits for patients in step with the payback patients get from copay assistance cards -- which effectively means the insurer gets the copay assistance discount, not the patient. This restores the balance, making cheaper drugs more attractive to patients again.
Real US drug prices, factoring in discounts and rebates, fell 5.6% in the first quarter of this year, mostly due to copay accumulator programs. Drugmakers don't like copay accumulators much, and are trying to figure out ways to defeat them. Matthew Turner -- who is working with drugmakers as director of patient affordability at TrialCard, which operates copay cards for companies -- says that new payment options are being considered that will evade detection by the pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs). Unsurprisingly, Turner didn't give any details of those schemes. Drugmaker Amgen has said it has modified copay assistance cards for arthritis drug Enbrel to work only if the funds are applied to a patient's deductible. Amgen officials didn't give any details either, saying the information was proprietary.
Kevin Cast, of the pharmaceutical consulting firm Archbow Consulting, commented that drugmakers may be better off providing steeper discounts to the PBMs in exchange for ending copay accumulators, since trying to trick them isn't going to work: "As soon as a copay card company makes a slight adjustment, they'll figure it out." Welcome to the black comedy of the real world, and pity the patient trapped in the crossfire.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE X OBJECTS: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Tiny, Far-Flung Worlds Could Explain Outer Solar System's Strange Geometry" by Alexandra Witze, 04 June 2018), for going on a century there's been attempts to find a large ninth planet in the distant reaches of the Solar System, primarily by examining perturbations in the orbit of Neptune.
Early efforts led to the discovery of the minor planet Pluto, but it was basically an accident; it would eventually turn out that there are a number, possibly a great number, of minor planets on the rough order of size of Earth's Moon in the outer Solar System. Ann-Marie Madigan, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Jacob Fleisig, one of her undergrads, have now suggested the planet search is futile; a large number of such extreme objects or "X objects" might well account for the perturbations of Neptune's orbit. According to Fleisig: "Smaller bodies cause this detachment, not an unseen ninth planet."
The researchers were inspired by recent discoveries of far Solar System objects -- for example, the world known as "Sedna", which never gets closer to the Sun than about 76 astronomical units (AU), an AU being the Earth-Sun distance. For comparison, Neptune, the outermost of the planets, is about 30 AU from the Sun.
The X objects are puzzling, the belief being that they were originally formed closer to the Sun, in the realm of the planets, and were somehow pushed outward. In 2016, Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena proposed the existence of a planet nine which would never get closer to the Sun than about 200 AU. The two suggested the planet's gravity could have pulled the X objects outward.
Fleisig and Madigan reply that a planet nine isn't necessary. They ran supercomputer simulations of how bodies might interact in the outer Solar System far beyond Pluto, in the icy region known as the "Kuiper belt", to find that a multitude of Moon-sized worlds could do much the same work as a planet nine. Over millions of years, the collective gravity of these smaller worlds would nudge the orbits of distant objects, with the bigger objects pulled into the most distant orbits.
Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, Canada, calls the study "very cool" -- and adds that it might help explain other puzzles of the outer Solar System. For example, a recently-discovered X object, designated "2015 BP519", orbits the Sun at a steep angle relative to the plane of the planets. Other simulations suggest the gravitational interactions of the collection of X objects can also produce unstable orbits like those of 2015 BP519.
Batygin still believes the planet nine model is the real answer. Continued discoveries of X objects should help resolve the issue. The "Outer Solar System Origins Survey", an international collaboration that ended in late 2017 found more than 840 icy worlds orbiting far beyond Neptune. More are expected to be found.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* QUANTUM THERMODYNAMICS (3): Appreciation of the energetic requirements of information processing seemed to open doors to rethinking the laws of thermodynamics in the quantum realm. There were even hopes early on that the impossible barriers raised by classical thermodynamics to perpetual-motion machines might be relaxed in the microscale. Raam Uzdin, a quantum physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, commented: "This was the train of thought we had learned from quantum computing -- that quantum effects help you beat classical bounds."
It was eventually realized that wasn't the case. Recent analyses suggest that quantum versions of the SLOT, which governs efficiency, and the third law, which prohibits systems from reaching absolute zero, not only retain much the same constraints as the classical versions, but actually impose more stringent constraints.
Jonathan Oppenheim, a quantum physicist at University College London, says that some of the differences arise because the macroscopic thermodynamic quantity "free energy" -- the energy available in a system to do work -- doesn't have just one counterpart in the microscale, it has many. In classical terms, free energy is calculated by assuming that all states of the system, determined by the arrangement of particles at a given energy, are equally likely.
According to Oppenheim, that's not true in the microscale, some states being much more probable than others. That means defining multiple free energies -- which is troublesome enough, but the implication is that each of the free energies will have its own variant of the SLOT, with quantum devices will be constrained by the aggregate of them. Oppenheim finds this an unhappy result: "Since the second law tells you what you aren't allowed to do, in some ways, it seems that having more laws on the microscale leaves you worse off."
For now, efforts to define quantum variants of the laws of thermodynamics are largely theoretical -- but researchers engaged in the work say the effort does have observable implications. For example, an analysis carried out by two quantum physicists based in Argentina showed that as a quantum refrigerator nears absolute zero, photons will spontaneously appear around it. One of the researchers, Nahuel Freitas of Ciudad University in Buenos Aires, comments: "This dumps energy into the surroundings, causing a heating effect that counters the cooling, and stops you ever reaching absolute zero."
Theoretical analysis is also showing that, if the laws of classical physics aren't overthrown at the quantum level, there still may be some wiggle room in the microscale. In a theoretical analysis examining flows between hot and cold chambers, or "baths", of particles, a team based in Barcelona that included quantum physicist Manabendra Nath Bera discovered a strange scenario in which the hot bath seemed to spontaneously get hotter, while the cold bath became colder. Bera says: "At first, this looks crazy -- like we can violate thermodynamics."
Then the researchers soon realized that they had overlooked the quantum wiggle: the particles in the baths can become entangled, with multiple particles temporarily establishing a common quantum state. Making and breaking these entanglements could, in principle, provide a way to store and release energy. After accounting for entanglement, the microscale laws of thermodynamics fell into place. Several independent groups have suggested that entanglement could be used to store energy in a "quantum battery". It wouldn't store more energy than the classical limits allow, but it might be faster to charge and discharge.
The idea that quantum effects could be exploited to improve thermodynamic performance also inspired the diamond experiment under way at Oxford, which was first proposed by Kosloff, Uzdin, and Amikam Levy, also at the Hebrew University. Defects created by nitrogen atoms scattered through the diamond can act as an "engine" -- a machine that performs an operation after being brought into contact with first a hot reservoir, in this case a laser, and then a cold one.
What Kosloff and his colleagues expect is that such an engine can be operated in an "enhanced" mode, by exploiting "quantum superpositions", in which some of the electrons are in two energy states at once. Maintaining these superpositions by pulsing the laser light, instead of using a continuous beam should drive the crystal to emit microwave photons more rapidly than it otherwise would. So far, the team's experiments are bearing out this expectation.
Quantum physicist Peter Haenggi, of the University of Augsburg in Germany, is encouraged by the experiments -- but doesn't think they are bold enough yet, nor that experimenters have fully appreciated the difficulties of performing experiments in the quantum microscale, where the results of two experiments on the same phenomenon can give contradictory results, depending on how the experiment is performed. Haenggi says such factors are "difficult to calculate", and even more difficult to deal with in design of experiments.
Ian Walmsley, who heads the Oxford lab where the diamond experiment was conducted, is also cautious, pointing out that experiments in quantum thermodynamics are, for the moment, "opportunistic", leveraging off apparatus set up for other uses. Walmsley appreciates the current excitement in quantum thermodynamics, saying the field is "fizzing with energy", but doesn't know what's going to happen over the longer run: "Whether it will continue to sparkle, or just explode into nothing, well, we will have to wait and see." [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (19): According to the 1st clause of Section 1, the president is the Commander-in-Chief of the US military, but has no military rank. This is one of the most significant facets of the Constitution: ultimate control of the military is in civilian hands. This would, in practice, also mean that the different armed services would report to civilian cabinet secretaries -- at the outset, the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy, with others added as new services arose, leading eventually to the creation of a superior Secretary of Defense to impose some order between them.
The president is America's war leader, which is one of the big reasons the Framers wanted a strong executive, granted executive power. As Commander-in-Chief, a president can take warlike actions on personal authority in an emergency, but only Congress has the formal right to declare war. Presidents, it would turn out, would be inclined to order combat operations in scenarios short of outright war. It is necessary, of course, for presidents to keep Congress informed of military actions. In much the same way, the executive branch does not have authority for regulating commerce, that being granted to Congress via the Commerce Clause -- but the president implements the laws passed by Congress, and has broad discretion in the practical regulation of commerce.
The 1st clause went on to say that the president could accept the counsel of the cabinet secretaries or senior department officials -- or not, as the case might be. Incidentally, there's nothing in the Constitution that directs the president to have a cabinet; it's just that there's not much other sensible way to run things. However, Congress has little say in how the president runs the White House.
The 1st clause more emphatically ends to declare that the president could grant pardons. The presidential pardon power is very broad; in essence, the president can, on personal authority, call off the dogs of the Federal justice system. A president can only pardon individuals, and the pardon only applies to Federal offenses, not offenses against state law; pardons in that case are at the discretion of the state governors. The president can also commute sentences.
The only stated restriction on pardons is that a president can't nullify an impeachment by Congress. There also is the interesting question of whether presidents can pardon themselves for crimes. The Constitution doesn't say they can't, but it's an absurd idea, it being a fundamental principle of modern justice that people cannot sit in judgement of themselves. As Madison put it: "No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity."
The Constitution is still mum on the question, so it can't be ruled out. However, a presidential self-pardon would certainly be challenged, and would have to be sorted out by the judiciary. It is unlikely the judiciary would be sympathetic: the Framers clearly saw pardons as an exercise in executive clemency when it was needed, and never saw the pardon power as a presidential "get out of jail free" card. A presidential self-pardon would be an effective admission of guilt.
The 2nd clause of Section 2 defines the establishment of treaties -- in specific, with a supermajority of the Senate, the House having nothing officially to say about it. The Senate doesn't actually ratify a treaty, instead authorizing the ratification of a treaty, with the executive and foreign power then exchanging instruments of ratification. It's a technical distinction; the bottom line is that the Senate approves or disapproves ratification.
However, to no surprise, it's not so straightforward in practice. The first issue is that international relations often run on practical issues instead of grand principles, and getting Congress involved in every little trade or other petty issue would be simply impractical. For this reason, one of the executive powers of the presidency is the implicit right to "executive agreements" -- allowing the president to come to terms with other countries without congressional approval.
Executive agreements are a parallel concept to executive orders. There are occasional spats between Congress and the White House over what is a treaty and what is an executive agreement. Congress may enact legislation that authorizes the White House to make executive agreements, for example in a trade negotiation -- this mechanism being now known as a "congressional-executive agreement (CEA)". If Congress doesn't like an executive agreement made without its approval, the body can pass a law overriding the agreement. The president can then veto the law, which can only be overridden in turn by a two-thirds vote of all the Congress, meaning the president has an edge in such confrontations.
Another issue is that the Constitution does not specify how to abrogate a treaty. Presidents can abrogate treaties on their own authority, and have done so in a few cases; Congress can also pass legislation overriding a treaty. Such confrontations are rare enough that the judiciary hasn't yet articulated a broad doctrine on the matter. Of course, Congress has no particular mechanism to create treaties and force them on a president; presidents draw up treaties at their own discretion, with Congress merely providing advice and the Senate deciding to approve, or not.
Presidents appoint government officials and Federal justices at their discretion. Senate approval is only required for senior officials, such as cabinet secretaries; inferior officers are appointed by the president without Congressional approval -- and obviously, heads of government organizations do their own hiring with little oversight from Congress. Occasional interventions aside, Congress does not get to micro-manage the Federal bureaucracy.
The president can, as a rule, remove appointed officials without approval, though there have been difficulties with that on occasion. Congress occasionally has raised a fuss about removal of officials -- and also may raise a fuss about officials who had been given the stamp of approval by an earlier Congress. If that said official has no friends in Congress, Congress can make life very difficult for that official, who may then be perpetually harassed, reduced to ineffectiveness, and forced to resign.
As a bit of fine print, a president can appoint officials when the Senate is in recess, though with the officials only authorized to serve to the end of the following session. This has proven useful to allow presidents to establish temporary appointments to officials who would not otherwise have been approved by Congress. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Volcanologists Warn World Is Unprepared For Next Major Eruption" by Alexandra Witze, 6 March 2018), the world is perfectly familiar with major natural disasters -- like the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, and the Tohoku earthquake in Japan in 2011. However, efforts to deal with disasters tend to be reactive, only becoming earnest after the disaster has occurred.
That means the world is unready for a cataclysmic volcanic eruption. The last time such an event took place was in 1815, when Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia blew its top -- killing tens of thousands immediately, leading to a "year without a summer" in Europe and North America. Such blasts rate a "7" or more on the "Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI)", which tops out at VEI == 8.
Chris Newhall, a volcanologist with the Mirisbiris Garden and Nature Center in Santo Domingo, Philippines, was the lead author of a recent paper that examined the potential consequences of a VEI == 7 eruption. According to Newhall: "The next VEI-7 eruption could occur within our lifetimes, or it could be hundreds of years down the road." He believes that, given such uncertainty, we need to be planning for it now.
The paper considered the VEI-5 eruption of Mount Saint Helens in Washington state in 1980, and the VEI-6 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Those events killed dozens to hundreds of people and disrupted regions. Pinatubo spewed enough out sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cause a blip of global cooling. However, a VEI-7 eruption would be in a different league.
The researchers point out that agriculture, health care, financial systems and other aspects of modern life are much more globally interconnected than they were just a few decades ago, and so more vulnerable to disruption. The eruption of Eyjafjallajoekull in Iceland in 2010, a minor VEI-3 eruption, grounded European air traffic for days because of the danger of flying through volcanic ash, resulting in an estimated $5 billion USD in economic losses.
Newhall and his colleagues believe that researchers preparing for a VEI-7 eruption should start by examining how it would interfere with radio communications and navigation systems -- for example, to consider how atmospheric moisture and volcanic ash might interfere with GPS signals. Others should focus on obtaining a better advance warning of such an eruption. The researchers have identified candidate volcanoes capable of a VEI-7 eruption, including Taupo in New Zealand, which produced the Earth's last VEI-8 eruption 26,500 years ago, and Iran's Mount Damavand, which is only 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Tehran.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Plants Outweigh All Other Life On Earth" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 21 May 2018), a survey of the breakdown of biomass on the Earth shows that plants are overwhelmingly predominant, sequestering 80% of the carbon stored in organisms. The survey also found that groups like arthropods with a large number of species don't necessarily contribute so much to the biomass.
The researchers spent three years reviewing the scientific literature to get their figures. The biomass was measured in terms of carbon content to factor out variable components like water. The contribution of plants was overwhelming, with plants amounting to 450 gigatonnes of carbon (GTC), out of a total biomass of 550 GTC. The bacteria, archaea, and protists ran to 70, 8, and 2 GTC each, or 80 GTC in total; fungi ran to 12 GTC.
All animal life amounted to a mere 2 GTC, half of that being arthropods. While human biomass is only 0.06 GTC, humanity has had a major impact, with livestock outmassing wild mammals by a factor of 20, while domesticated foul similarly outmass wild birds. Humans have also had a major impact on plant biomass, which was up to twice as great 20,000 years ago. The study isn't actually over yet; the researchers were actually trying to determine the most abundant protein on the Earth. They hope to have an answer in 2019.
* As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Colossal Family Tree Reveals Environment's Influence On Lifespan" by Erika Check Hayden, 01 March 2018), computational biologist Yaniv Erlich of Columbia University in New York City and his colleagues have used crowdsourced data to build a family tree that links 13 million people. It is believed to be the most exhaustive genealogical study ever performed, spanning an average of 11 generations.
The researchers noted the birth and death rates of the individuals in the tree, and examined whether they were more likely to die if they were closely related. The conclusion was that heredity explained only about 16% of the differences in lifespan. Other factors, such as locale and lifestyle, were more significant.
Researchers have increasingly come to view genetics as a minority influence on longevity; Ehrlich suggests that genetics are even less of an influence than had been believed, saying that a "good" set of genes might extend life by an average of five years. In contrast, smoking subtracts an average of ten years.
Erlich's study used data from an online genealogy tool at GENI.com. He's the chief science officer of MyHeritage, Geni's parent company, in Or Yehuda, Israel. The analysis was based on 86 million people whose records had been uploaded to GENI.com. Computational genomicist Atul Butte of the University of California, San Francisco, comments: "The sheer number of participants is crazy. You can only get data sets like this with crowdsourcing. It's really impressive."
The researchers also analyzed the migration and marriage patterns of people listed on GENI.com. For example, before 1750, the researchers found, most Americans and Europeans in the database married someone who lived at most 10 kilometers from their birthplace. By 1950, most Americans and Europeans had to travel at least 100 kilometers from their home towns to find a spouse.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GAIA REVELATIONS: In 2016, the European Space Agency released a preliminary star map obtained by the ESA's "Gaia" satellite, as discussed here at the time. As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Billion-Star Map Of Milky Way Set To Transform Astronomy" by Dave Castelvecchi, 25 April 2018), that was merely an appetizer.
In April 2018, the ESA released the first fully 3D map of the Milky Way obtained from Gaia. The map includes almost 1.7 billion stars, including the distance, colors, velocities, and directions of motion of about 1.3 billion of them. The map covers a volume of sky a thousand times greater than any previous map. Megan Bedell of the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, was ecstatic: "In my professional opinion, this is crazy awesome." Within hours of going online, thousands of users from around the world had already started downloading the data.
Along with the 551-gigabyte database, the Gaia team released a number of scientific papers -- if only to demonstrate the quality checks on the data, and suggest how it is to be used. The Gaia team did not want to release their own studies before the rest of the astronomy community could get their hands on the data. Nonetheless, the papers had some revelations. Floor van Leeuwen, a Gaia researcher who spoke at the release press briefing, found that certain star clusters puff up at the same time as large stars sink to their centers. Van Leeuwen said: "We weren't allowed to make discoveries, but we couldn't avoid making them."
Preliminary work also provided better estimates of the distance to variable stars used as "standard candles", with their known brightnesses used to estimate distances beyond the reach of Gaia's parallax measurements. Researchers will put in long hours to produce papers from the data as fast as they can.
Using the data, for example, researchers will be able to test models for how the Galaxy formed through mergers of smaller galaxies; measure the distribution of dark matter; and refine their theories for how stars evolve as they burn through their nuclear fuel. Denis Erkal, an astronomer at the University of Surrey in Guildford UK, and his collaborators plan to use Gaia data to weigh the Large Magellanic Cloud, the largest of the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. They will obtain the mass by measuring tidal motions in our Galaxy's stars caused by the dwarf galaxy.
Some researchers are trying to discover tens of thousands of exoplanets by watching stars wobble under their planets' gravitational pull -- but the satellite must collect several years' more data to make that happen. Others will inspect similar wobbles in search of evidence of the passage of gravitational waves. In addition to tracking stars, the probe has monitored asteroids, with an emphasis on finding those that might hit Earth.
The next Gaia release will be in 2020. Although a glitch in February 2018 put Gaia into a temporary "safe mode", it is now in good health, and has enough fuel to continue observations to 2024.
* In other astronomy news, according to a press release from the Carnegie Institution, Carnegie Meredith MacGregor and Alycia Weinberger have found a massive stellar flare from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own Sun, that took place on 24 March 2017. They found the flare searching through data from the "Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA)", a radio telescope in Chile made up of 66 antennas.
The flare increased Proxima Centauri's brightness by 1,000 times over 10 seconds. It was preceded by a smaller flare about ten hours earlier. At peak luminosity, the flare was ten times brighter than our Sun's biggest flares, as observed over the band covered by ALMA. Stellar flares haven't been greatly observed in that band -- especially for stars of Proxima Centauri's type, the common M-type red dwarfs.
Stellar flares occur when a disturbance a star's magnetic field accelerates electrons to speeds approaching that of light. The accelerated electrons interact with the highly charged plasma that makes up most of the star, producing an eruption with emissions across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Proxima Centauri has a companion planet, designated Proxima b, which is 20 times closer to the star than the Earth is to the Sun. According to MacGregor:
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It's likely that Proxima b was blasted by high energy radiation during this flare. Over the billions of years since Proxima b formed, flares like this one could have evaporated any atmosphere or ocean and sterilized the surface, suggesting that habitability may involve more than just being the right distance from the host star to have liquid water.
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COMMENT ON ARTICLE* E-BIKE REVOLUTION: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Electric Invasion", 21 June 2018), personal electric rides are booming, nowhere more so than in China. The streets are full of two-wheelers, with executives in suits riding electric kick scooters, maneuvering past the faster electric bicycles. The two-wheelers crowd the cities in the millions.
They're catching on in the West as well. The Dutch, long enthusiastic about bicycles, are going electric, with one in three bikes sold there in 2017 being electric. 15% of bikes sold in Germany in 2016 were electric, with Belgium and France embracing the technology, too. European manufacturers are gaining strength, with exports of e-bikes becoming an export market. Businesses are participants as well; German logistic giant Deutsche Post DHL operates about 12,000 e-bikes and three-wheeler e-trikes. They're sold for fun, too, with an e-mountain-bike being popular.
They aren't cheap, running to a few thousand euros each, more with added bells and whistles. As a result, new businesses are popping up to rent or lease them out -- to support couriers working the gig economy, or leisure riders. Bike-sharing services are adding e-bikes; almost a third of Paris's Velib fleet, for example, is electric.
In America, the focus is more on e-scooters, which have become the latest craze out of California, with e-scooter rental firms growing at a fast clip. Bird Rides, a pioneer of the business, only about a year old, is now reportedly valued at $2 billion USD. In places like Santa Monica, one of the places Bird started out in business, they're normal transportation. Users unlock an e-scooter using a smartphone app, and then take off, leaving the e-scooter at a dropspot, for somebody else to ride. Each ride costs $1 USD, plus 15 cents per minute.
The business model also allows people to make money by charging e-scooters. Freelance "bird hunters" pick up scooters with empty batteries and plug them in at home, with Bird paying from $5 to $25 USD per e-scooter charged. The rate increases with the difficulty of finding an e-scooter, with "dead" machines located with another smartphone app. The vehicles are typically charged overnight, with the vehicles to be back on the street at dropspots before 7 AM the next morning.
This outsourcing model explains why Bird and other e-scooter rental firms have been able to grow so rapidly. Lime, one of Bird's biggest competitors -- co-founded by Toby Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur -- boast a similar valuation as Bird, and has beat Bird by setting up shop in Paris. Ride-sharing companies are getting into the market now, with Uber having bought out the e-bike sharing startup Jump, and Lyft similarly looking for an acquisition.
With the boom comes three big questions: How to regulate them? Are the business models supportable over the long term? And what about the data they generate?
The morning rush hour in Amsterdam can look like chaos. That was true to an extent before e-bikes were introduced, but they have picked up the pace. Crashes are not common, but cycling deaths are on the rise, with e-bikes accounting for a quarter of a fatalities in 2017. Dutch authorities have started to react, requiring that e-bikes with a top speed of over 25 KPH (15.5 MPH) have a license plate, and that riders obey the same rules as apply to moped riders -- for example, to wear a helmet. Other European countries have passes similar rules.
The proliferation of e-bike rental firms in Amsterdam has also raised concerns with the authorities. By the summer of 2017, dockless e-bikes were littering the city; in September, the city swept them up, and ordered a moratorium on bike-share schemes. The ban will be lifted as rules are imposed; the number of shared bikes is likely to be limited to 9,000.
A number of American cities have similarly clamped down on e-scooters. San Francisco banned them in early June 2018, with the scooters to be re-introduced over two years in methodical fashion. The city will only issue permits to five companies, who will only be able to run a total of 2,500 scooters. Santa Monica is opting for a more flexible "dynamic" model, based on vehicle usage -- a mindset much more liked by the startups.
As far as the viability of business models go, e-bikes are certainly great for manufacturers. Many e-bikes are powered by gear from Bosch, a German conglomerate. The firm started tinkering with the technology in 2009; today, the firm provides drive units, displays and battery packs -- the component with the fattest margin -- to more than 70 e-bike brands.
The giant of e-scooters is Ninebot, a Chinese firm, which also owns Segway, the maker of self-balancing "personal transporters". Most rental firms started by buying off-the-shelf scooters from the firm, which run between $300 to $400 USD. However Lime, in particular, is moving toward more customized vehicles that are more robust and have a longer battery life.
The rental firms are not hurting either. Both Bird and Lime claim that an e-scooter brings in more than $20 USD a day on average, meaning an e-scooter will pay itself off in weeks. If two million e-scooters are deployed across the USA, they could pull in almost $15 billion USD a year. The first with the broadest offering are likely to come out on top; Lime rents out e-scooters, e-bikes, and conventional bikes. The big ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft may well buy out successful firms, and incorporate them into general transport services: from e-scooter, to rideshare car, even to air taxi.
The rental business involves handling a lot of data. Right now, firms like Bird and Lime are using data to improve their services, for example to make sure their vehicles are evenly distributed around a city. Data, however, could become a business in itself -- for example, with traffic analysis giving an edge to property developers and local retailers. Santa Monica is already benefiting from data provided by Bird and other firms, with the city able to determine see how often scooters are used and whether poor areas are underserved. Sun of Lime is more visionary, believing that scooters could one day become mobile sensors, collecting data on everything from pollution levels to street conditions.
Whether the future is e-bikes, e-scooters, or both is hard to say, but it's not hard to say they have a future. The technology is its infancy, and likely to become much smarter and more flexible -- raising the prospect that the chaos they have created will lead to harmony. It should be interesting to watch.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: I have been digging into Twitter more lately -- spending a bit too much time pestering creationists, a bad habit I admit, but hard to resist. I have been following some Twitter accounts, and hooked up with the satirical site THE ONION. It can be mindless and crude, but it definitely has its moments. One article, titled "Daddy, I Don't Want To Live In The World Your Website Has Created", released on 15 June. It was a thinly veiled assault on Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, from the mouth of his infant daughter Max, an edited-down version being reprinted here:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Daddy, I've been thinking. I know I never talk to you about Facebook. You've worked really hard on it, and it means a lot to you, so as your daughter I've always tried to keep quiet whenever it comes up. But I just can't stay silent anymore. It's time for me to stand up for what's right.
I don't want to live in the world your website has created, Daddy.
You said Facebook would be a new way for everyone to connect and make friends, but I've noticed most of those connections are kind of superficial. I think the site has probably done more dividing than uniting, don't you? It pretty much just reinforces people's biases, spreads a lot of lies, and fills our world with hate. That has made it easier for politicians and corporations to manipulate people.
By the way, it doesn't help that you use people's data to sell advertisements. Nobody likes it when you do this. Nobody. You know that, right, Daddy? So why do you do it?
Everybody says you're really smart, but why would a smart person want to build something that makes people unhappy? Daddy, be honest: did you make your website bad on purpose? In your Senate hearing, you said you didn't know all the ways it was hurting people. But if you made the whole website, wouldn't you know everything about it, even all the bad things it can do to people? All you and your website do is hurt people. I mean, really, what you did to journalism alone! It made people stop trusting the news.
You know, Daddy, you don't have to work on your website forever. Maybe you could get a different job? My friend Madison's daddy is a doctor. He helps sick people get better. I want to tell my friends that my daddy has a job where he helps people. Seriously, Daddy, have you ever helped anyone in your whole life?
Is it all about the money? You have $72 billion, money that came from hurting people. When will it be enough? Remember, no matter how much you donate to charity, people will always remember you as a bad person who created a bad thing. That makes me sad, and it should make you sad, too. Daddy, how do you sleep at night knowing that so many people hate you?
END QUOTE
THE ONION really has it in for Zuckerberg -- and, one can argue, unfairly so. Social media is a monstrosity, of course, but Facebook has become a scapegoat for a much bigger problem. From the 1990s, the internet changed everything. Access to floods of information came at a price, with major problems in security and privacy, as well as what is now known as "fake news". It was obvious early on that the internet granted a revolutionary level of influence to crackpots, nutjobs, and trolls in general. It wasn't until 2016 that it became obvious, to the shock of all, that unfriendly governments (read as "Russia") could leverage off the trolls to undermine democracy. Go online, and it's got hot and cold running treason.
Zuckerberg didn't create this ugly problem, and he's by no means the only one stuck with it. Nobody really knows how to fix it, and it will take a generation to set it right. It will be fixed. It has to be.
* Moving from there, the Real Fake News for June began with the growing trade war between the US and, more or less, everyone else. It hasn't broken out in earnest yet, with the US demonstrating a degree of selectiveness, while trading partners respond with carefully targeted tariffs of their own. The game is leading to ironies; for example, although reviving American coal production is an issue near and dear to President Trump's heart, its only sign of vitality recently is export sales to China. Now the Chinese have shut down the coal trade with tariff barriers. The general reaction to the trade wars is that nobody will win them.
Nonetheless, Trump is staying the course. He met with other leaders in Quebec on 8-9 June at the G7 summit, where he threw an extended tantrum, accusing them of taking advantage of the United States economically -- and worse, took the G7 to task for expelling Russia after the occupation of Crimea in 2014.
It was observed that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron had both tried to reach out personally to Trump, in hopes of influencing his policies; in the end, they were simply humiliated, learning that Trump looks out for Number One first, last, and always. When Trudeau replied that Canada would have to look out for his country's own interests in the face of American tariffs, he was predictably denounced by the White House as "stabbing America in the back".
It appears there is somewhat more noise than substance to Trump's trade wars, but there is a great deal of noise, so that means there's still some substance there. Trump only knows the zero-sum game: for him to win, the other guy must lose, or be seen to lose. This might work in a flim-flam business operation, but it doesn't work in diplomacy. As Trudeau said in an interview before the summit: "No deal is better than a bad deal."
Following that, on 12 June Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore; the meeting ended with Kim stating that North Korea would move towards denuclearization, with the US giving up joint maneuvers with the South Korean military for the time being. The meeting was of course played up as a triumph for the US -- even that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize -- but the best that might be said about it was that it didn't alter the status quo in any substantial way.
Many commenters thought Kim had got the better part of the deal, the meeting raising his international stature and political standing, as well as softening American pressure on the Kim regime -- without Kim giving up anything of substance in return. Yes, it does seem that Kim wants some relaxation of tensions, and some opening of his country to the world; and he has made a show of destroying some nuclear and missile test facilities. However, there's no hint that Kim will allow a UN inspection team to monitor his nuclear facilities, and no hint that he will give up his nukes.
There are worries that Trump may settle for a deal in which North Korea destroys its long-range missiles that can hit the USA, with America relaxing sanctions. That would leave South Korea and Japan still at the mercy of North Korea. Appallingly, Trump has suggested that Japan would be better off to go nuclear as well, an idea that few of the informed like. Since the Trump Administration is making a show of staying tough with North Korea, there's no immediate prospect of that -- but with Trump, there's no ruling anything out.
On 14 June, when Trump was back in Washington DC, the Justice Department released a report on the 2016 FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. Trump of course declared victory, pointing to unkindly remarks by FBI staffers against the Trump presidential campaign as proving the FBI was working against him. Of course, there were also unkindly remarks against the Clinton presidential campaign, so that seems a wash, and Trump's complaints just monkey business as usual.
The report also concluded, to absolutely no surprise, that FBI Director James Comey's handling of the email investigation left much to be desired -- not in the sense, as Trump would like to hear, that the investigation white-washed Hillary Clinton, but that his public criticisms of Clinton while exonerating her of wrongdoing, and in particular his announcement at the last moment that the investigation was being re-opened, were inappropriate.
However, the report went on to say that Comey was nonetheless correct in exonerating Clinton. Trump ignored that; as well he might, since it underlined the fraudulence of his campaign to "LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP!" Not that made any difference, merely confirming what sensible people already knew, and insensible people don't care about it. Indeed, Trump has shown no inclination to give up the chant. Never mind that there's no substance to it, never was any substance to it; the faithful eat it up.
The excitement over the report was then upstaged by events on America's border to the south, when a policy of separating illegals from their children and incarcerating them separately came to light. The public furor was predictably loud and angry, only becoming angrier when the White House made no serious attempt to defend the policy -- though Trump finally had to backtrack. Even in that, the Trump Administration continued to inflame the situation, as discussed by the late-night comedy squad:
BEGIN QUOTE:
JIMMY KIMMEL: While Trump was busy ... his wife, Melania, went to visit migrant children in McAllen, Texas. Did you see what she was wearing? Now keep in mind, she was on her way to see children who've been separated from their parents. This is what she wore on a plane ride there -- a jacket that said: "I Really Don't Care, Do U?" Is the president now tweeting onto his wife's clothes?
The first lady's getting a lot of flak for the jacket. Her spokeswoman said, "It's a jacket. There was no hidden message." Well yeah, no one thought the message was hidden -- it's written in big letters on the back.
STEPHEN COLBERT: ... right on the back! And I'm going to guess this is one message she did not steal from Michelle Obama.
How many people would get fired for this at a normal White House? One? Five? The entire executive branch? Because in the middle of the worst moral scandal in recent memory -- so bad her husband backed down for the first time -- people who are supposedly on her side let her get on a plane with a jacket that said: "I Really Don't Care, Do U?" For the record ... we DO!
END QUOTE
The statement on Melania's jacket was effectively meaningless, but no less an offensive gesture because of it. This was particularly bizarre since Melania has always kept such a low public profile, never courting controversy. Her husband does, and it's not hard to think imagine she had been told to wear the jacket.
Coupled to this, Congress continued to flounder along on coming up with an immigration bill. Late in the month, the House went to a vote on a compromise bill -- one which did offer citizenship for the Dreamers, but also funding $25 billion USD for Trump's border wall. Getting to the vote was tough enough, with Trump denouncing the effort in tweets -- only to grudgingly endorse it at the last minute. It did no good, since it was resoundingly voted down by the House, and wouldn't have made it through the Senate anyway.
Coming on top of this, the New York Attorney General's office lit into the Trump Foundation, Donald Trump's alleged charitable organization, with a lawsuit. According to the AGO, the foundation was a slush fund to which people contributed, with Trump then using the money as served his convenience. Where the lawsuit goes, who knows? Jimmy Kimmel observed:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Of course Trump is denying the charges. I guess we'll see. I don't know - I kind of feel like if you saw the words "Donald Trump charity" and gave money, you deserve whatever you get.
END QUOTE
As a bit of a sideshow, Trump continue to promote an independent "US Space Force", though few could understand any reasoning behind it, other than it sounded whizzy. The Air Force already operates the US Space Command, and it's not easy to follow what benefit there would be in splitting it off as an independent service. One might allow that the US Air Force be renamed the "US Aerospace Force" to bring it into the 21st century -- but it's not easy to see what particular value that might have, either.
And to top off the month, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he would retire at the end of the July, with the Trump Administration of course to select a replacement. It seems likely that Kennedy, a moderate, recommended moderate replacements to Trump; if he did, it is still a good bet that Trump will select an extremist. The only hope of blocking such an appointment is an alliance between Senate Democrats and the few GOP moderates. With a 49:51 ratio, that could happen, but it isn't a safe bet.
There was considerable dejection among those weary of Trump and his antics over this news -- but the hand-wringing among them was tiresome. It was obvious from the start of the Trump Administration that he would be able to adjust the Supreme Court, and it's no surprise that it's happening. A solidly conservative SCOTUS is not fun to contemplate, but it nonetheless remains a sideshow to the mad comedy of American governance at the present time.
* Win some, lose some, the show goes on. Barack Obama, in an opening shot of what is going to be his starring role in the 2018 mid-term elections, spoke at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Beverly Hills, demonstrating some impatience with the hand-wringing in a 45-minute speech, Obama saying:
BEGIN QUOTE:
"Enough moping!" He told the crowd they were "right to be concerned" about the state of American politics, but stressed that it was not enough to watch and lament the latest developments.
"If you are one of these folks who is watching cable news at your cocktail parties with your friends and you are saying: 'Civilization is collapsing,' and you are nervous and worried, but that is not where you are putting all your time, energy and money, then either you don't actually think civilization is collapsing, or you are not pushing yourself hard enough. And I would push harder."
Obama took shots at Republicans, although he never mentioned Trump by name. "They are mad even when they win," he said of conservatives. "Have you noticed that? They don't look happy at all!" He also said that the current Republican leadership is about "women staying in their place in all kinds of ways."
"Fear is powerful," Obama said. "Telling people that somebody's out to get you, or somebody took your job, or somebody has it out for you, or is going to change you, or your community, or your way of life -- that's an old story and it has shown itself to be powerful in societies all around the world. It is a deliberate, systematic effort to tap into that part of our brain that carries fear in it."
Obama, however, came back in the end to his trademark positivism: "The majority of the American people prefer a story of hope. A majority of the American people prefer a country that comes together rather than being divided. The majority of the country doesn't want to see a dog-eat-dog world where everybody is angry all the time."
END QUOTE
Obama is a self-confident man, and his coolness was on full display in Beverly Hills. Trump, a man of belligerent insecurities, can only feel frustration in his snipings at Obama -- to find Obama doesn't take them seriously, to the extent he notices them at all. Obama has no fear of Trump, having taken his measure. As Obama said back in October 2017:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Instead of our politics reflecting our values, we've got politics infecting our communities. Instead of looking for ways of working together to get things done in a practical way, we've got folks who are deliberately trying to make folks angry, to demonize people who have different ideas ... to provide a short-term tactical advantage. If you have to win a campaign by dividing people, you won't be able to govern them.
END QUOTE
* Working from there, an essay ("The Rising Cost Of America First" by Lexington, THE ECONOMIST's rotating US commenter, had a number of astute observations, beginning with Trump's diplomatic efforts with North Korea:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Negotiations had long been frozen over America's demand that Kim Jong Un's regime should give up its nuclear arms, and the regime's refusal to do so. Yet there were two ways an America president could shake things up: by promising Kim Jong Un more normal relations, or threatening him with war. Most North Korea-watchers considered the first unconscionable and the second unrealistic. Mr. Trump, unburdened by such niceties, tried them both, sometimes in the same breath.
Whatever the merits of the ensuing detente, the tactic has paid off handsomely for the president. It has enabled him to create a semblance of historic progress, which has driven his supporters wild with glee and bookmakers to slash their odds against him bagging the Nobel peace prize. And in case the deal comes to nothing, he says he has a contingency plan. He will simply "find some kind of an excuse" to absolve himself of blame.
This was so predictable it is amazing Mr Trump retains such power to shock. Almost all his disruptive foreign-policy moves, the rows with allies, withdrawals from international agreements, tariffs and threats of worse on every front, can be viewed primarily as tactical ploys intended to push his self-image as a decisive leader; honor ill-considered campaign pledges; or stoke the partisan, nationalist, and xenophobic sentiment from which he draws strength.
END QUOTE
This being a fairly small bag of tricks, Lexington suggested it is now headed for diminishing returns. Trashing Barack Obama's legacy by junking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran nuclear deal was easy, giving Trump maximum exposure, with the long-term problems easy to ignore. Trump does not think about the long term. Bashing America's closest allies over trade was easy, too, and cost him little.
Alas for Trump, he's shot his bolt. He has no more big Obama deals convenient to overthrow, and America's allies are no longer expecting to be treated with any consideration. Instead of knuckling under to Trump's trade demands -- as incoherent as they are, it would be hard to do so -- they are retaliating in kind; and they not keen on supporting American diplomatic efforts. Playing the trade war card will not seem so cheap and easy when farmers lose their export markets -- or the auto industry has layoffs, to naturally blame them on the White House.
So where does Trump go from here? Might he decide to start exercising restraint? Restraint isn't his style. Might he double down and start making more trouble on the world stage? That sounds more plausible; but then, Trump is almost all bluster, and not very bold when it comes to facing obvious risks. Trump knows better to do something that is going to backfire on him, like start a full-blown trade war, or get into a shooting match. He will end up being restrained only because he has no workable choice, and so will simply double down on the bluster:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The president may maintain his antagonistic style, but follow through on fewer threats and promises. He may still threaten war, in trade and militarily, but he will not start one, because wars are expensive and end up unpopular. He will still float audacious deals, but he will settle for smaller-bore pacts ... that he can spin as something bigger. ... It is how he conducted his business. It also best describes the stunt he pulled in Singapore.
END QUOTE
Incidentally, in response to the Singapore summit KAL, THE ECONOMIST's cartoonist, portrayed Kim Jong Un telling his generals: "Donald Trump tells us that if we cooperate ... he will treat us like one of his CLOSEST ALLIES!"
To which the generals scream in unison: "OH NO!"
COMMENT ON ARTICLE